There's an old story that goes like this....
The Chickens wanted the Pigs to contribute to the farmer's breakfast.
"The problem is", said the pigs, "that whilst you are involved in the breakfast we pigs would be fully engaged".
Now, we don't ask today's students to give their lives for their studies as that would miss the point and mess up the graduate employment statistics but we do ask them to give rather more than the Chickens.
Student engagement is somewhat of a Holy Grail for Higher Education. Of course, engaged learners are higher performers but just what motivates them to become engaged? It's certainly not simply the desire to "get their moneys worth" - so is there a secret?
Skinner et.al. (2008) - considered 805 schoolchildren, attempting to define the reasons for disaffection. They broadly concluded (and the summary is mine) that active, repeated, rewarded learning leads to behaviours that drive engagement.
Lectures are rarely active, never repeated (except for Lecture Capture) and rewarded fleetingly by the attention of the academic scheduled to drone in front of rapidly changing Powerpoint slides. So why are we still designing our HE experience on things that do not lead to learning?
The Chickens wanted the Pigs to contribute to the farmer's breakfast.
"The problem is", said the pigs, "that whilst you are involved in the breakfast we pigs would be fully engaged".
Now, we don't ask today's students to give their lives for their studies as that would miss the point and mess up the graduate employment statistics but we do ask them to give rather more than the Chickens.
Student engagement is somewhat of a Holy Grail for Higher Education. Of course, engaged learners are higher performers but just what motivates them to become engaged? It's certainly not simply the desire to "get their moneys worth" - so is there a secret?
Skinner et.al. (2008) - considered 805 schoolchildren, attempting to define the reasons for disaffection. They broadly concluded (and the summary is mine) that active, repeated, rewarded learning leads to behaviours that drive engagement.
Lectures are rarely active, never repeated (except for Lecture Capture) and rewarded fleetingly by the attention of the academic scheduled to drone in front of rapidly changing Powerpoint slides. So why are we still designing our HE experience on things that do not lead to learning?
No comments:
Post a Comment